by Fiona Kidman
‘Put him in the ambulance,’ I screamed. ‘Please get him to the hospital.’
But it seemed that first he must be made clean, so the whole process began all over again. Midnight had passed by the time the ambulance left the city. We drove, again through silence. The Vietnamese had put up their shutters, lain down to sleep. The motorbikes that choked the streets earlier had disappeared. The lights had gone out except for the tiny flickers of fires peppering the pavements, illuminating the shadows of late workers bending over their pots. The ambulance progressed very slowly. We seemed to be moving far away from the city centre. I had no idea what direction we were taking. I saw the shapes of buildings through the gloom, so I knew that we must still be within the confines of the city. Days had passed since I left home, and already a day had gone since I had eaten the cloudy flesh of the dragon fruit at the hotel.
We reached the hospital, a stark building, concrete and totally without charm. A team of nurses rushed to my husband’s side, and, as suddenly as we had entered the fluorescent-lit space of the hospital, he had disappeared. The place seemed otherwise deserted, except for a man behind a big desk. ‘You will now show me your passport,’ he said.
I showed it to him.
‘You will now give me your husband’s passport.’ He took it from me.
‘Can I have it back, please?’ I asked.
He shook his head with impatience. ‘Not until he leaves the hospital. They tell me your papers for the insurance are not in order. You will now give me five-hundred dollars.’
‘American?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t have that much money on me,’ I said.
‘Show me how much.’
I opened my wallet and turned it out on the counter; a little over three hundred dollars fell out, perhaps another fifty in smaller notes. He picked through them. ‘I have to have some money to get back to my hotel,’ I said. ‘I have no idea where I am.’
‘Three hundred will do,’ he said.
‘I want to see my husband.’
‘That is not possible. The doctor will come.’
I waited in a vestibule with couches covered in brown faux leather. While I waited, a woman I soon discovered was American came to the desk. Her husband had just been admitted with a heart problem. He, too, had gone to intensive care.
‘But this is preposterous,’ she said loudly to the man at the desk. ‘He’s had a murmur like this before, he doesn’t need intensive care. In the morning, I’ll take him to Bangkok, see a proper doctor. Tell them to take him out of there.’ The man spread his hands in a gesture that said, ‘This is not my problem.’ My eyes met his, and for a moment something like sympathy passed between us. At least I hadn’t told him what to do.
The woman introduced herself to me. Her name was Irene. She had just come to Hanoi with her husband, who was to work in one of the banks. I have never quite understood American women. When I travel, I find them often generous and funny and warm, but they have a brittle edge that threatens to snap if they are crossed.
‘Hey, seems you’re a bit stranded,’ Irene said, when we had exchanged a few words, and she gave me her card. ‘If you’re still on your own tomorrow night, we could go out and play a bit, what d’you think? Don’t worry about your husband, he’ll be fine. At least these doctors know how to fix tummy bugs.’
A Vietnamese doctor appeared and introduced himself to me.
‘Your husband is now in isolation,’ he said.
‘Has he got cholera?’
‘No. It is not cholera.’
‘What is wrong with him?’
‘He has rotavirus. Very infectious disease.’
A virus, I thought. ‘It’s not serious, then?’
‘Oh, yes, it is serious.’
‘He won’t die, will he?’
‘Oh, maybe. His kidneys do not work now. He is, how do you say, dehydrated. He should have seen a doctor much more early.’
‘Tonight? My husband might die tonight?’
‘Prob’ly.’
‘I must see him.’
‘Not possible. Now he is in isolation. You go home now.’
‘Where? Show me where he is.’
After a while, he relented and took me in a lift to another floor. I was led through a door that had to be unlocked from the other side by some nurses. After that, there was another locked door, and through a window, in a bare cell, I saw my husband lying naked on a stripped-down bed. He appeared barely conscious.
‘I’ll stay here.’
‘No, you cannot stay here. You must leave now.’
A nurse took my arm. She led me back to the lift and accompanied me to the ground floor. ‘You must go.’
I shouted at her. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’ll sleep here.’
She shrugged and made a face at the man behind the desk. I lay down on the concrete floor. The nurse left, and I was by myself. I sobbed then, as if I would never stop. All the old fretted and worn seams of love that had stretched but never parted were laid out before me. My husband was dying, and I was alone in a city where I had never been, lying on a concrete floor. Each of us was alone.
The man at the desk came over to me. ‘You may lie on a bed that is in the next room,’ he said. ‘It is for emergencies. If an emergency comes, you must get out of the bed.’
And this small act of kindness had its effect. My behaviour was pointless and ridiculous. I took my mobile phone and worked out how to dial our children’s numbers with the country code added in. But it seemed they had turned off their phones for the night. I figured that it must be about half-past five in the morning. I have a friend who sleeps badly and lives alone. I called her. I said, ‘Find my children. Please.’
Our daughter rang me. ‘Mum,’ she said. ‘Mum. Don’t let my father die.’
Our son rang me. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Mum.’ He was crying.
The man at the desk came into the room a short while later. He said, ‘Your ambassador is coming.’
My daughter had rung the night desk at Foreign Affairs and explained that her father was dying in a hospital in Hanoi. The man had agreed, with some scepticism, to check it out. But the people from the embassy who arrived in a large Jeep at the door of the hospital were not sceptical. They were kind and practical and had brought a translator with them, and some food and bottles of mineral water and dry ginger ale. I had never been more pleased to see people from my own country. A while later, I left the hospital with them. I was told a senior doctor would see me in a few hours. They took me back to the hotel in the city, promising to fetch me when I had had time to shower and eat breakfast, talk to my insurance company and perhaps sleep a little. All of which I did, except the last. But before I did anything else, I wrote a long letter to my husband, in which I told him what had happened since we left Bangkok, because I was certain he wouldn’t remember and I thought it unlikely the nurses would have the language to tell him where he was or how he had got there or why he couldn’t see me. I told him, too, how much I loved him, how he must fight to get well because, if he didn’t, I wasn’t sure that I could go on. Although this seemed like blackmail, it was better than saying goodbye in a letter. I needed him to help me go on with my life, I said. It was as simple as that. Once before he had nearly died, but he had got better, and he could do it again.
I saw the senior doctor, an older man, impatient with people like me. His job was to make people better, not talk to the relatives. The translator from the embassy sat with me, but the doctor did command some stilted formal English. He interrogated me. ‘Do you wash your hands properly?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘When you go to the lavatory?’
‘But of course.’
‘Rotavirus comes from dirty food that is contaminated with excrement. You need to be more careful.’
‘But I haven’t given my husband his dinner for more than two weeks,’ I said.
So then I had to explain my journey, where I had come from, how my husband and I
had met in Bangkok, how I had expected him to be happy when he saw me but he wasn’t. I made it into a little drama, waved my hands about, and he allowed himself a small smile before his expression closed again.
‘Your husband will be here for quite some time,’ he said. ‘We will do what we can to make him well. Now I must see the next wife.’
The next wife was Irene, who had grown angrier since I saw her the night before, and a new wife waited behind her, a dark Portuguese woman who was stranded and almost without language. She was weeping in a silent persistent way, unchecked snot covering her lip. This was Maria, whose husband had fallen down some steps on a cruise ship and hit his head. Smash, she said, smash.
The translator took me to the clinic where I had been the day before. Now that the insurance company had cleared our policy I could get my money back. The clinic wanted to give me the money in dongs, Vietnamese currency. Fourteen million. In the end a deal was struck, and I got the five-thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.
‘You must make sure the safe is locked very hard,’ said the translator.
So began my life in the Sunway Hotel. A woman who ate dinner in the Allanté Restaurant most nights of the week and came to know the waiters by their names. The food was excellent, both Vietnamese and French. It’s difficult to recall what the dishes were, although I would eat them over and over again as a way of passing the time, of doing what I must in order to keep going, and yet it’s hard to remember. I know that there was food cooked with nuoc mam and ginger and lemongrass, as well as bœuf bourguignon and crème brûlée. The house wine was Luis Buñuel rosé, named for the Spanish movie director who had taken up with Mexico and made films about violent sex, religion and ecstasy. As rosés go it was all right. The problem was how to order more than two glasses without drawing attention to myself. It was wildly expensive, but I had handfuls of hundred-dollar bills in my safe, and I didn’t really care. After dinner, I moved downstairs to the jazz bar and listened to a trio of musicians. I got to know their repertoire as well as I knew the menu and have as easily forgotten it, but while I listened to them I could drink another glass of Luis Buñuel.
I was a woman who was driven across the city of Hanoi in a taxi four times each day, return journeys made once in the morning and once in the afternoon, to find out how my husband was doing, because I couldn’t ring up and ask. Nobody had the language to answer me. When I arrived at the hospital, I made my way to intensive care and waited for a doctor to see me, sometimes the Vietnamese doctor who got angry when he had to talk to me again, sometimes French doctors who were kinder on the whole. None of them would allow me into the room to see my husband, although I was allowed to peer through the glass. I talked to the other wives. Irene’s husband had taken a turn for the worse, but then so had Maria’s. The fizz had completely gone out of Irene, she was surly and tired. Maria crossed herself incessantly and cried.
‘It’s really a case of whose husband is going to die first, isn’t it?’ Irene said.
When I was not being driven to the hospital and back, I walked the streets and lakesides of the city. There are hundreds of lakes, but, when I came to Hoàn Kiếm, I was certain I had found the one I was looking for, the lake where Duras’s mother had run the boarding house, a location where Duras had suffered a great trauma as a child. I say location because Duras was also a film-maker so, as I read her, my mind was making pictures. A red bridge led to a temple near the shore. I was constantly surprised by the redness of things in Vietnam. A pavilion that, from afar, appeared the size of a chimney, had been built in the centre of Hoàn Kiếm in honour of a fifteenth-century Vietnamese hero: his magical sword was said to have been eaten by a gold tortoise. Hoàn Kiếm means Lake of the Restored Sword. On the shoreline stood a row of French colonial villas, and I decided there and then that this was exactly where the boarding house was, or had been. I had thought there was a red bridge in Duras’s story, but when I go back to her text there is no sign of one. I had begun to feel impatient with Duras, that she had led me into unimaginable danger, and I had almost had enough of her. I crossed the red bridge and came to the temple and lit some incense for my husband, then I sat and watched the surface of the lake. In the green days of love, when we were young, he and I had sat on the steps of our apartment and watched the dark light of night falling across that other lake.
One afternoon, when I arrived at the hospital, a second American woman, the wife of another man who worked in the city, had set up camp at the entrance to intensive care. This woman, who was called Stacey, was very bad news, crazy and out of control, far worse than I had been. She was so thin she looked as though she might break in half. I have no idea what was really wrong with her husband because her language was peppered with lengthy bursts of unintelligible medical terminology. From the drift of it, I supposed that, like Irene’s husband, it must be something to do with his heart. Both Stacey’s parents were doctors, and she was on her mobile calling them in New York, as they diagnosed her husband’s condition and told her what treatment he needed. She crouched on the floor, skinny backside in the air, shouting the names of drugs as she wrote them down on a pad in front of her. ‘These doctors,’ she screamed, ‘they have no idea what they’re doing. Mommy. I have to stop them.’ Two French doctors appeared and tried to calm her down. The Vietnamese doctor, the one I tried not to irritate, was watching, his expression implacable. He was not easy to appease. I had learnt to keep quite still in his presence, not to speak loudly or move my hands about quickly. A week of my vigil had now passed, and I had been allowed in to see my husband for just one minute. I thought he had recognised me. He was surrounded by tiny Vietnamese nurses with hands like the wings of dragonflies, and it seemed that he knew them better, in that minute, than he did me. But then I was wearing a mask and gown.
Irene and Maria and I looked at one another while Stacey raved on. ‘Pouf,’ said Maria and turned away. She appeared not to have changed her clothes for several days. She was still wearing the same elegant dark garments she had on when I first met her, only now they were soiled and shabby, and her hair was matted around the sides of her face. Irene was trying to get her husband to Bangkok, but their paperwork wasn’t in order, which had confounded her, and, besides that, Bangkok Airport was closed because of political riots.
Irene, looking at Stacey, said: ‘Well, that sure as shit isn’t going to get her anywhere.’ We looked at one another again, for once with real recognition. The survivors. So far.
At the embassy I had struck up one of those surprising spontaneous friendships that would carry on beyond the moment, past Hanoi. Anne lived by the West Lake in a tower block of diplomatic apartments. The rooms were cool and beautifully furnished, with pictures by New Zealand artists on the wall and books by New Zealand writers on the shelves. I ate with her and her husband some evenings on their balcony overlooking the lake, and near to Trúc Bḁc, which John McCain famously parachuted into after he’d been shot down during the Vietnam War. Anne had begun to take me in hand. She had taught me how to say xin chào (hullo) and cảm ơn bạn (thank you), both very useful phrases. Xin chào, cảm ơn bạn, I said, endlessly smiling. What else could I say? Nobody would accept my Western tips, which were not permitted in communist Vietnam. Hullo and thank you got me a long way. Anne sent me to look at cathedrals, showed me about the city, took me to restaurants I wouldn’t have found on my own. I had promised the staff at the embassy that I wouldn’t walk out alone at night, and I had no real wish to do so.
Once night fell, I wanted to stay in the Sunway Hotel and eat and listen to jazz. Oh, yes, and drink Luis Buñuel rosé. Anne had lent me a novel by Joan Didion, one that captured a familiar tone in her writing: a lone woman in a deserted tropical hotel, drinking bourbon and waiting for something to happen, before someone gets killed by secret agents. Often there are jacaranda petals floating on a swimming pool filled with dirty water, and riots in the distance. There was no swimming pool at the Sunway, but, yes, one night, two Americans went up in
the lift at the same time as I did. They were dressed in beautiful suits, wore expensive watches, sported crisp handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. The older of the two, a big man, had shining silver hair, not a strand out of place. The younger one, shorter, tubbier, said, ‘So if there’s nothing doing here, what happens next?’ The older one said, ‘We go down to Saigon and see what we can stir up there.’
It was as if I were invisible. Later, in the jazz bar, I saw an Asian man dressed with even more exquisite care — silk socks, gold-framed spectacles — sitting reading a newspaper. I thought, he’s going to meet with those men from upstairs. And, after a while, the older one did come down. The Asian man produced two very large cigars and, from his pocket, a guillotine cutter that sat snugly in the palm of his hand. He squeezed his hand shut and opened it with a look of satisfaction on what I supposed was a perfect cut before offering it to the American and repeating the ritual. They sat with little conversation between them. After some time had passed, the second, younger American appeared, took his seat and accepted the ritual of the cigar, though he looked pale at the prospect.
Of course, I wanted to stay and hear what I could, but there are only so many glasses of Luis Buñuel one can drink, and so many times you can listen to a jazz trio when they have completed their repertoire for the third time, without being observed. The Asian man had become aware of my presence.
The younger American reminded me of someone. Not Didion, I thought, Graham Greene. The Quiet American. There’s trouble brewing here.
Trouble lurked everywhere, if you let it find you. I took a taxi to the Temple of Literature in the heart of Hanoi. The taxi driver charged me five times the fare I knew I should pay. When I remonstrated, he pushed me out of his taxi and came around to where I stood, clutching the side of the car, demanding the money. I gave it to him but also wrote the number of the taxi in my notebook as it disappeared down a boulevard.
The temple I had come to visit was built in honour of literature, a university begun in the year 1076. Five courtyards lie behind thick stone walls, filled with flowers and ancient trees and white-robed monks gliding through the shadows. As I walked in the temple grounds, I thought how the concept of temples built to honour words was so different from where I came from. I have made a temple in my head for words for as long as I can remember. They have preoccupied me when I should have been doing other things. Cuckoos and crickets, spring crocuses, they have darted and bloomed in my brain. I’ve put them down on paper, fought them and rearranged them and regretted them. Sometimes, when we were careless, my husband and I, words stood in the way of love, those wrongly chosen, spoken in haste, shouted, as if we were killing each other.
